West Bank: Israel Responsible for Rising Settler Violence
Human Rights WatchApr 17
Israeli Settlers in West Bank Kill 2 Palestinians
The Facts
Israeli and Palestinian officials have confirmed that Israeli settlers in the West Bank killed two Palestinians on Monday, following a recent wave of violence sparked by the kidnapping and murder of a 14-year-old Israeli settler on Apr. 13. Following the teen's death, settlers rampaged in several Palestinian towns and villages.
Monday's killing brings the total of Palestinians killed by settlers or the military since Apr. 13 to eight. A Palestinian witness to the deaths said that 50 settlers, many of them armed, attacked members of his community and fired at Palestinian youth, killing two of them and wounding others.
The Spin
Pro-Palestine narrative
The Israeli state continues to show its complicity in the settler movement, which is primarily motivated by the desire to permanently expel Palestinians from their land and dash any hope of a Palestinian state. Israeli raids in the occupied West Bank were brutal before Oct. 7, and now Palestinians are being killed and displaced at an unprecedented rate, with nearly 20 communities being affected just in recent months. Nothing excuses the endemic violence Israeli forces have unleashed in the West Bank, and the situation is only getting worse.
Pro-establishment narrative
Though settlements are neither the origin nor the cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the sitting Israeli government must do more to curb the escalating settler violence in the West Bank. The US is always willing to accommodate Israel's security concerns, but Israel must also be willing to work with the US and curb extremism so that a durable peace to this conflict can be realized.
Pro-Israel narrative
The pernicious myth of "settler violence" must finally come to an end, as it creates a morally abhorrent equivalence with Hamas' terrorism. Of course, a tiny minority of Jewish communities in the West Bank, which they refer to as Judea and Samaria due to the region's ancient history, do commit violence against Palestinians. However, since Oct. 7, incidents of "settler violence" have gone down, while Palestinian terrorist attacks in Judea and Samaria have only gone up, yet the media is only interested in violence committed by Israelis.
Nerd narrative
There's a 50% chance that at least 826 Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank will be caused by Israeli forces before July 1, 2024, according to the Metaculus prediction community.